Ask not what your ‘zine can do for you

I spent most of this Sunday evening planning out a talk I’m giving tomorrow on the subject of The Entrepreneurial Writer. Part of this talk could be called ‘How to get ahead in the cut throat egotistical world game of being a writer’, but mostly I am talking about how writers are important to communities, and how the online world is changing how communities work and how writers contribute to them (for the better in my thinking)

So it was timely to run into Clarkesworld magazine’s call for Citizens. You might call this a creative and original way to raise funds, which of course it is. But it is also an acknowledgement of the role that a online magazine like Clarkesworld plays in forming and maintaining a community of people. Like any community, Citizenship comes with both rights and responsibilities, and those who take on the later get more of the former. I could imagine Citizenship becoming the defacto method of generating support for many online communities.